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Datrium makes European push as it targets storage ‘big guys’
NVMe pioneer turned hybrid cloud and “data platform” provider makes a push for the enterprise and wants to take scalps from those selling “1990s SAN technology”
Datrium, a startup most notable to date as one of the pioneers of NVMe flash storage, has announced plans to expand into Europe.
The move is based on a shift by the firm towards focusing on enterprise customers, aiming for new geographies a part of that.
A D-series funding round saw the Silicon Valley startup gain $60m in September 2018, and CEO Tim Page said the firm had experienced “a massive Q4” and “will start to expand to geos”.
That expansion has seen Datrium hire 30 new field reps and move into Europe, initially based in the UK, with no concerns over Brexit, said Page.
The plan is very much to go for enterprise customers and to target customers of the incumbent big five storage players.
“We’re going after the big guys,” said Page. “The old array manufacturers that are running 1990s SAN technology.”
He added that most of the money raised would go into an “enterprise-class sales force”, with some devoted to product development, most notably around a push towards hybrid cloud, which now figures highly for Datrium.
Datrium may have started as a company very much focused on NVME flash storage, but it is now making a big deal of hybrid cloud and sees itself as a broad data platform.
Here the firm is responding to a trend towards hybrid- and multi-cloud operations. Its core on-premise product is DVX, which sees NVMe flash storage on server compute nodes with bulk HDD-based storage on data nodes. DVX provides flash storage performance of 3x to 4x that of SCSI-connected flash.
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Last year, Datrium added Cloud DVX, which runs in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud as an adjunct to on-premise deployments.
It now sees disaster recovery (DR) as the killer app for hybrid cloud, and is pitching itself as an ideal way to achieve this, with its built-in backup capabilities plus data reduction.
Datrium’s CloudShift DR orchestration tool allows customers to spin up VMware virtual machines from the cloud in case of an outage.
So, it is the case that Datrium is NVMe-powered Rubrik, but marrying primary storage and cloud backup where Rubrik is secondary storage.
But CTO Sazzala Reddy wants Datrium to be seen more widely than that. “We are a software company,” he said. “We have built solidly on our software foundations and we are adding more to our platform. We want to be a platform for data any time, anywhere.”
In particular, Datrium aims to target the portability of VMware and Kubernetes-based workloads between on-premise and cloud platforms and expects to announce more in this regard in 2019.
